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[This story contains major spoilers for Spider-Man: Brand New Day.]
The last time Michael Mando stepped onto a Spider-Man set, the year was 2016, and the movie was Jon Watts’ Homecoming — Tom Holland’s first standalone Spidey tale. Fresh off the second-season release of Better Call Saul, Mando found himself standing inside a real-life prison as Mac Gargan, better known as Scorpion, opposite Michael Keaton’s Adrian Toomes/Vulture. Then reality interrupted fiction, as an actual prison riot broke out at their penitentiary location, forcing their dialogue to be rerecorded in postproduction.
Back then, it seemed like Watts was setting up a future story in which Gargan would have a hand in revealing Spider-Man’s secret identity of Peter Parker. After all, he resented the Web-Slinger for not only getting him arrested during a botched arms deal with Toomes, but also disfiguring his face in the process. Plus, credit scenes during that era of the Marvel Cinematic Universe were reliable indicators of what was to come, something that would ultimately change in the volatile post-pandemic marketplace.
Instead, Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019) utilized Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal) to out Parker, and then Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) delivered a multiversal story involving all three live-action Spider-Man actors (Holland, Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield) and the rogues’ gallery from the Sam Raimi and Marc Webb phases of the Sony-owned franchise.
